ABSTRACT
One of the predecessors to psychological and socio-cultural approaches to emotion is the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century philosophical movement of Romanticism that emphasised individual uniqueness and intuition, elevating emotional experience to an importance as great as that of reason. It is a philosophy of being predicated upon a pursuit of freedom and equality achieved through self-realisation and a transcendent process uniting imagination, reason, and conscious and unconscious emotion. It laid a foundation for many later intellectual movements of social and political critique, particularly those connecting individuals’ inner worlds and the socio-historical context, including that of educational experience: the dialectic idealism of Hegel, historicism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and the artistic movements of decadence, expressionism, absurdism, surrealism, and DaDaism. To Berlin, romanticism was the greatest single shift affecting life and thought in the West (1999: 1–2).
